Category: Step 2: Choose your profession

Here at Jobs on Toast our aim is to expand your employment horizons, and get you thinking about your wider work options beyond the academy. This month, we welcome a guest post by Suman Agarwal, who explains the benefits of Image Consulting as a career path. Enjoy!

Image Consulting is a fast-growing and sought-after industry, since it caters to the most common need in the 21stcentury – the ability to project an image that can impress. And this has created a need for professional Image Consultants who can help individuals develop impressive personalities. Whether you’re an engineer, a marketing professional, a student, or a business professional, you can join the image consulting workforce and lead change in yours and others’ life.

Before we find out why Image Consulting is a rewarding career option nowadays, let’s answer the most asked question – what is an Image Consultant?

An Image Consultant understands their clients and creates a roadmap to enhance their personalities and help them get an edge in this competitive world. They work with professionals and homemakers as mentors and trainers to help them get ahead in their professional and personal lives through grooming, styling, and other image management services. Image consultants help individuals convey the right messages via their clothing and behaviour for specific events, situations or goals.

Why Image Consulting?

Financial Security – The strong demand for image management has created brilliant work opportunities for Image Consultants who can enjoy one of the most desired benefits – financial security. For instance, in India Image Consultants can earn from INR 10,000 to INR 100,000 (USD 140 to USD 1,400) for a day of counselling (some even more). Image Consulting Business Institute-trained Image Consultants are living testimonials to it – Benaisha Kharas earned INR 100,000 (USD 1,400) for a day of training and presenting her story at TED Talks, and Sonika Shah earned INR 500,000 (USD 9,000) for a single styling and personal shopping assignment.

Work-Life Balance – While Image Consulting is a rewarding career option for anybody, it is especially a blessing for mothers and homemakers who are often forced to give up on their careers to nurture their families. Becoming an Image Consultant allows you to ditch the monotonous 9 to 5 jobs and be with your family while you work – without having to give up on your dreams. Here’s how:

● You don’t need an office space since you can work from home and at the timings that best suit your schedule.

● You can be your own boss and choose who to work with and what projects to undertake.

● You can sign up for quirky and flexible work opportunities that do not require you to work all day every day.

No Specific Academic Qualification Required – Whether you quit your studies for personal reasons or have a qualification that has nothing to do with image consulting, you can always jump on the bandwagon and register for an image consulting course. All you need is the passion to train and transform lives. If you have these qualities, you can most certainly consider become an Image Consultant:

● Effective communication skills

● People-person skills

● Sense of style and grooming

● Good interpersonal skills

● Confidence while speaking in public

Build Something of Your Own – Image Consulting allows you to take matters in your own hands by establishing your own Image Consulting firm. Certified professionals can work as part-time image consultants to build their portfolio as well as their clientele. And after that, they can set up their own image consulting business and be the boss!

Ticket to Many Glam Careers – The biggest advantage of becoming an Image Consultant is that a single image consulting certificate unlocks many glam career opportunities for you. It allows you to don many hats and work with different industry professionals to help them enhance their images. All you need is the passion to remodel lives and a knack for networking to be able to build a vast and varied clientele. Here are a few career options that you can juggle after becoming an Image Consultant:

● Personal Stylist

● Wardrobe Consultant

● Corporate Stylist

● Celebrity Stylist

● Grooming and Etiquette Coach

● Confidence Coach

● Personality Development Trainer, etc

Age is No Bar – What makes the Image Consultant course very opted for is that it doesn’t come with an age prerequisite. You can opt for both image consulting and soft skills training courses whether you’re 17 or 70. It’s your attitude and practice that will give you an edge over others.

If you’re ready to achieve the perfect work-life balance and empower others by conditioning personalities, choose a renowned image consulting institute based on reviews and its accreditations. Do your research so that you can take an informed decision.

Take control and play to your strengths to grow infinitely. Good luck!

Author Bio:

An award-winning Image Management Professional, Suman Agarwal has helped students, home-makers, women on sabbatical as well as people seeking second career alternatives to explore Image Management and Soft Skill Training as a vibrant professional choice. She frequently writes blog posts about the urgent need of image consulting professionals and soft skill trainers in the 21st century and loves guiding people in exploring rewarding career options. You can email Suman to seek advanced career guidance, or view her profile on LinkedIn.

Are you interested in breaking into financial services and/or banking? I recorded a 10-minute guide on how to get your first job in finance, for the PhD Career Stories podcast. I’ve included the 7 actions you need to take to get started – listen here:

‘Hello I’m Chris Humphrey, I’m the founder of the careers website Jobs on Toast. Having originally worked as a PhD and post-doc in Medieval Studies, I left academia for a career in business, and today I work as a project manager in a UK bank.

In this podcast episode I want to introduce the range of careers that are available to PhDs in the Financial Services (FS) sector. I’m going to give you some tips and tricks for how to break into this line of work. You don’t need to have studied a finance degree to get a job there – certainly I didn’t. But I did use the transferable skills I gained from my PhD and my previous employment experience, to land my job as a project manager with a medium-sized bank.

So let’s start by looking more closely at Financial Services as an industry. Financial services are a key sector of the economy – after all, we all need bank accounts where we can pay in our grants or salaries, pay out for our bills and living costs, and save something for the future. And we need insurance to protect against something going wrong, covering our possessions, our health and our pets. Certainly, I insure Ned my cat, paying a small amount monthly to protect against a large vet bill!

In the UK in 2017, the financial services sector contributed £119 billion to the UK economy, 6.5% of the total economic output. The sector was largest in London, where 50% of the sector’s output was generated. There were 1.1 million financial services jobs in the UK, 3.2% of all jobs. So it’s a serious industry, much bigger than academia, and hence potentially more opportunities for you to find work and apply your skills.

Because capital and credit are so central to modern economies, if something goes wrong, like it did in the financial crisis of 2008-9, the consequences can be severe and long-lasting. So the financial services sector is very highly regulated by governments. This provides further opportunities for employment e.g. at central banks like the Bank of England, and the industry regulators – in the UK, the Prudential Regulatory Authority, and the Financial Conduct Authority.

OK, so having looked at the broad nature of the sector, we can now turn to look at the types of job roles that available in Financial Services. And consider, how can PhDs of any discipline enter this line of work?

By this, I mean roles where you’re dealing directly with customers, either face-to-face or remotely. Although many banking and insurance processes are now automated, companies still employ large numbers of people to deal with work that can’t easily be done by machines e.g call centre work, opening more complex kinds of accounts, and assessing insurance claims. If you’re dealing with business customers, for instance helping to arrange loans and overdrafts, this is also an area where a human touch and personal relationships are key. And of course there are sales roles where you are helping customers and clients purchase the right products and services.

In my view the administrative and customer contact work is work that any researcher could do. Right after I handed in my PhD on the Thursday, I started working as a temporary administrator for an insurance company on the Monday, generating quotations for life insurance. This helped me pay the bills over the summer, while I waited for my post-doctoral fellowship to start.

I appreciate that these kinds of jobs are not using the full range of your skills, and you might feel they are a step down. But on the other hand, you can see such a role as a stepping stone into the sector and gaining access to more senior roles. You’re using your communication skills, your organisational skills, you’re getting paid and gaining experience and seeing what opportunities exist for you.

The second type of job is in the back office.

Although our typical experience of financial services is going into a local branch, calling a phone number or using a website or app, remember that banks and other FS companies require a whole host of specialist services behind the scenes to keep them going:

IT services – to ensure that employee’s have computers and phones to do their work

As a researcher you could join a financial services organisation in any one of these roles. You are going to be relying on your transferable skills and applying them to the specialist role, rather than using your subject matter knowledge. For instance, in my current day job I’m a project manager. I help the bank I work for make changes to IT systems, launch new products and deliver training. I learned project management as a researcher, doing academic research projects, and I’ve since applied my project management skills in the transport sector, IT and now banking.

Another example of a PhD working in banking is Dr Patricia Bouteneff, who works as the chief of staff and resident historian at Citibanks’s Center for Culture in New York. Patricia holds a doctorate in Modern Greek literature. In her account of a typical week on the website phdsatwork.com, Patrica says ‘A short list of what we might do in a given week might include write histories, build timelines, mount exhibitions, provide images and art from our collections, give tours, research questions, conduct interviews, and hang art.’ How’s that for a job?!

The third type of job is core financial services roles

Within a FS company, there will be a core group of people in specialist financial roles e.g. chartered accountants, credit analysts, investment managers, product managers, financial analysts, financial advisers. They typically hold professional qualifications that demonstrate their capability to do the job.

If your PhD is in a core FS discipline, you can consider applying for these roles. Certainly, I’ve seen job adverts where investment banks are directly advertising for PhDs with statistical and financial backgrounds. Organisations may even have programmes to assist e.g. the Bank of England has a PhD internship program, so you can get valuable work experience while you’re doing your PhD. The Bank of England also directly hires PhDs with more than 3 years of work experience, check out their website for more details.

So we’ve spent some time looking at the 3 main types of job roles that exist within financial services companies. I hope that’s whetted your appetite and given you a better idea of the possibilities. If you fell that you are interested in a career in FS, here’s my 7 steps for what to do next:

1. Get going with some background reading – read an industry newspaper like the Financial Times. Listen to podcasts too, such as those produced by the Financial Times or BBC Money programme.

2. Make a list of your transferable skills and think about how you can apply your skills to the roles I’ve introduced

3. Decide how how you want to get into FS – in the front office, back office or in core financial services

4. Start looking at some job descriptions online and match your skills to the skills listed in the job description

5. Get some work experience in a FS company or in a relevant role

6. Network and do informational interviews with people who already work in FS

7. Come up with a good explanation of why you want to get into FS, to include in your CV and application letter. You are then in a position to start making applications for jobs, as you come to the end of your PhD.

OK so that completes my introduction to the career opportunities available to PhDs in the Financial Services sector, and some tips how can you make a transition into this line of work – I hope you’ve found that helpful. If you have any questions, by all means email me via the contact form on my website. Happy job hunting!’

One of my private clients recommended this book to me and it doesn’t disappoint. The authors have impeccable credentials, having taught the Life Design course at Stanford University for many years. The premise of the book is that you can apply the same principles to designing your life, as you can to designing new consumer products. How does that work?

Well, the authors explain that designers don’t just have a flash of inspiration and then design the finished article. They build prototypes, test them out with customers, tweak them, over and over again until they get it right. It’s an iterative process that requires patience and a degree of trust in a journey of discovery. And you can do the same when designing your own career. Continue reading “Book Review – Designing Your Life”